Coincidences

I like coincidences. They make life interesting because they are completely unexpected, serendipitous occurrences in one’s day. I’ve experienced a few that I remember years later, and still shake my head with wonder as I remember them.

Once I was buying dog food at a local tack and feed shop, and noticed a mother and young daughter in the store. I put the forty pound sack of dog food in the car and went on to my next errand—shopping at the Trader Joe’s about four miles away. As I was wheeling my cart through the store, the same mother and daughter came in.

Back in the late 1990s I was trying to find a scarce book. A book dealer I knew suggested that a contact a man in Tuscon, Arizona, who had made an authorized reprint of the book. I made the contact, and have enjoyed a friendship with that individual for over twenty years. Shortly after the book dealer’s recommendation, I was visiting a print museum in Carson City, and spent a little time talking with the owner. He mentioned that he knew a printer who still used the old-fashioned methods and machinery. I was amazed when it dawned on me that he was referring to the same person in Tuscon.

Two or three months ago I was at the post office in town and noted a car in front of me with a personalized license plate. An hour or so later, when I was driving out of the parking lot at the local Walmart, I found myself behind the same car. Well, that’s not too much of a coincidence since this is a small town. But back in 2012 when I was living in Orange County, California, I headed out to visit a friend. In front of me on the freeway was a car with an interesting and clever personalized license plate. I went on to visit my friend twenty miles away, spent an hour with him, then drove back home. As I turned off the freeway to the surface street that led to my home, I saw that I had pulled up behind the same car with its clever license plate. Orange County has a population of several million people and its freeways are almost always crowded with a million cars.

After I moved out of Orange County, there was one teenager I regretted not saying good-bye to; I was just too busy with many things under deadlines to take the time to do everything I wanted. Two years later I came back to visit friends and they suggested that we go to a movie at a local mall. I remembered that it was that teenager’s birthday. We went to the mall, and, in this same county with its millions of inhabitants, I saw the teenager. We had a very welcome meeting and a satisfying closure.

Back in 1980, while I sat in an easy chair I was watching my two-year-old son sitting on the carpet in the living room looking through the sliding glass door that led to the patio outside. It was pouring rain, and I remember being impressed with his rapt attention as he stared outside. Thirty years later, long after he had moved out, he came home for a visit. Once again I was sitting in that same easy chair; again it was pouring rain, and he stood in the very same place where he had sat as a toddler, looking outside with the same rapt attention.

A year or two ago, after a number of years without contact, I emailed a friend of mine who is a fan of the science fiction books I’ve written. We were glad to be back in communication, and after exchanging some pleasantries, we discovered that the small town where I moved after I retired was his home town, the small town where he had grown up in the 1950s. He was now living in New York and I was living more than 2,000 miles from where I was living when I wrote the books. And in another coincidence, the name of the town where he lives now is the same as the town where he grew up. He came to visit me, and the house where he was a child still exists.

Any of these coincidences could have been missed had something been slightly different. Ten seconds either way, or being in a different room, or holding off on an email, and the coincidence would either never have happened, or would have been unrecognized  if it did happen. Sometimes I wonder how many near misses we may have in our lives. Maybe none of these coincidences is of any significance other than to inspire wonder—but then wonder is a terrific part of life.

Surrounded by Wonder

Eleven years ago today I began this blog with a post about finding invincible beauty and joy in the midst of emptiness and discouragement:

johnonefive.blogspot.com/2006/10/little-bit-of-green.html

In some ways, that’s been the theme of this blog all along; its title “JohnOneFive” is a reference to the fifth verse of the first chapter of John’s Gospel, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” After well over a hundred posts since then, even I am somewhat surprised at how many of them present this theme.

And this one will too. It’s been more than two years since I last posted, and I think that now a lot of attention has turned from blogs to Facebook and other social media. But there are still a lot of blogs, and I hope to continue this one now more regularly. Many things have changed in my life in the past few years, more than I ever thought they would or could, and probably fewer people will read this blog than used to, but maybe it’ll be good for me to get back to blogging anyway. I have a backlog of lots of ideas, and it’ll be good to write them up.

Well. Surrounded by Wonder. I now have a daughter. She’ll turn two in December. She lives in a house with several walls of books. She’s had books of her own just about since she was born, and she loves them. First we read them to her, then she learned to read them on her own, and recently she’s read to others. They’re mostly pictures, of course, but she knows the alphabet and can pick out a few words, and can identify probably over a hundred illustrations like clouds, lampposts, turtles, lions, and balloons.

Watching her sit and read a few days ago, I thought about how many hundreds of excellent books there are in the house that she’ll be able to read in a few years. They are there now, and she even takes them off the shelves on almost a daily basis, and has learned to take care of them. But of course right now they are inaccessible to her—no more than marks on a page.

And then I thought how the whole world must be like that to everyone. Electricity was around before Benjamin Franklin began the process of harnessing it, but no one knew about it except to watch lightning. Only in the past century or so have we begun to understand the nature of atoms, molecules, and the wonders of quantum mechanics, though everything is made of atoms. Mystery has always been all around us, unknown and unrecognized; the Unified Theory is still a theory, tantalizing us with mysteries yet unknown. The more we learn, the more mysteries become evident.

This is all obvious to inquiring minds, and nothing very profound. But maybe it’s a good place to restart a blog after a two-year hiatus.

“Many things greater than these lie hidden, for we have seen but few of his works” (Sirach 43:32)